


my safety and my shelter

by mintpearlvoice



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/F, Living Together, Post-Canon, Post-War, Sensory Processing Disorder, Slice of Life, one drop of lemon juice in a glass of water is CANONICALLY too spicy for harrow, spoilers for harrow the ninth act one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-11
Updated: 2020-06-11
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:55:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24654214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mintpearlvoice/pseuds/mintpearlvoice
Summary: Gideon's requirements for food stop at hot.Harrow's requirements, however, stop at tasteless. It is literally easier for her to kill God (something she accomplished several years ago) than it is for her to eat something with spices and chunks.Or for her to admit vulnerability.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 8
Kudos: 127





	my safety and my shelter

**Author's Note:**

> "i'm not projecting" i insist as i eat plain pasta for breakfast for the eighth day in a row

Eating has always been, for Harrow, an experience somewhere between nauseating and hellish, to the point that during a brief stretch of her childhood she’d considered thanergetically animating a jawbone and its attached teeth to chew food for her, a suggestion rejected on the grounds that it would be even more gross. It’s not any specific dish she hates so much as the sensation of textures- sometimes grainy, sometimes slimy, sometimes just dry- flopping around in her mouth. She had been able to get away with a great deal of things in the Ninth. Everyone there thought it was perfectly normal to subsist on squeezing smooth flavorless nutrient paste into their mouths. 

In the rest of the universe, though…

At twenty, having toppled an empire, brought the galaxy back to life, and briefly experienced the heart of a dying star, eating is still an ordeal. Killing God for heresy? Yes. Fleeing to a nonhuman civilization that had a surprising number of career paths open for someone with a working knowledge of anatomy and biochemistry who could pick up computer programming over the course of three sleepless days and nights? Many of the theorems, the patterns, are familiar enough.

Soup with chunks?

No. Absolutely no. She refuses to even consider it.

From anyone else except Gideon, anywhere else but the kitchen table of cottage they share, this would be an assassination attempt. “Well?” the dumbass love of her life and unlife says, with a mouth full of stew. “C’mon. Dig in.”

Gideon doesn’t notice things. Or mostly, Gideon notices the things Gideon notices, which, while not as few or as far between as Harrow had once tended to assume, are remarkably specific. Things like “Can I fight it?” and “How can I fight it?” and “Titties?” After running through those three subroutines, her mind settles back into watchful snarky musings.

After so long not telling anyone anything- even not telling herself anything because she couldn’t trust her emotions to keep pace with her mind- still some part of her flinches at the idea of openness, of giving away any possible weakness. But this is Gideon.

Even when they were enemies, Gideon was always the one person she truly understood. The Gideon she knows now isn’t going to make fun of her.

“Gideon,” Harrow said, fighting the impulse to rock back and forth in her chair, not looking at the bowl on her plate and its hated contents. “Think about it. In our entire lives together, the childhood-long war that we’ve waged against each other, our disastrous sojourn at Canaan House, the fourteen months when I had stored your soul in a sword because the idea of devouring you ended my capacity to function utterly and the concept of being without you was literally etching away at my vital organs from the inside out- what have you seen me eat or drink?” 

Her nose wrinkles. At last, drumming her fingers on her muscular thigh, she enumerates: “Nutrient paste, obviously. I always hated that stuff. Porridge. Rice. Vitamin solution. Protein paste.” Harrow can practically see the gears turning in her mind. Finally she says, “But Magnus and Abigail-“

“Gave me two spoonfuls of stew in a whole bowl of rice, and that was a batch they’d made separately in a little pressure cooker without any of the spices. I told them that I’d been accustomed to a certain diet as part of my duties as a painted penitent of the gloomiest House, and that I didn’t want to ruin their fete by being unable to consume anything.” She remembers to say I told them instead of Ortus told them; she can never quite get the memories of her childhood and the memories of Canaan House to match up. Gideon always comes back into her mind in red-haired firework flares, bright and sudden, a flash that illuminates some dreary moment of her childhood or her studies, reminding her that fighting with Gideon her whole childhood gave her something to do besides studying old books and wanting to die. “I’m just. I’m sorry, all right? I know you worked hard to cook for us, but I can’t.” And, fuck it, she is going to rock back and forth in her chair after all. “I just. I can’t eat this.”

This is Gideon. Even so, thoughts crawl in Harrow’s mind like spiders. (Spiders don’t have bones. They have exoskeletons, requiring molting.) Her parents were always frustrated with the fact that she couldn’t eat properly. She was supposed to be the perfect daughter, the House’s salvation. Ianthe teased her mercilessly. Even the Emperor assumed, in his polite, placid way, that she could eat things with taste and texture if she just wanted to, and that she just wasn’t trying hard enough. Like chewing was some sort of theorem.

She stares at the bowl, emphatically not crying, as the whisper circles: you’ve let Gideon down.

Instead Gideon just says, “More stew for me, then. You want rice?”

“Thanks,” is what she replies around the lump in her throat. (Maybe this really is home. Not this planet, not the cottage they’ve been given in exchange for not destroying their new home with all-devouring necromancy. But Gideon, Gideon, Gideon is- no, has always been- home.)


End file.
